Square Enix brings time travel to Final Fantasy with the Historia Crux

Those of you wary of the Final Fantasy series due to the boring, linear despair that was XIII may be wondering how Square Enix plans to make it up to you in XIII-2. The answer: time travel. Yes, Square Enix has responded to fan’s complaints about the last incarnation of the series and introduced more freedom to the mission structure of the Final Fantasy universe with a time travel system called the Historia Crux.

Players will be able to travel backwards and forwards in time with the Historia Crux, which will function as the initial point of world navigation. To reach new space and time locations, you’ll have to find hidden “Artefacts” and reunite them with the corresponding portals. Once unlocked, you can return to any of these time-space locations from the Historia Crux which game director Motomu Toriyama likened to clicking links on a website.

Along with the novel time traveling, Final Fantasy XIII-2 plans on offering the strong mini game presence that fans are accustomed to. You won’t have to wait until half the story is over for sidequests as was the case in Gran Pulse, the Historia Crux will allow you to play sidequests right at the start of the game.

The freedom to come and go means the story detours and branches off into multiple routes. If you like your structure rigid, you can choose to follow the main story. Those looking for challenge can look forward to a wealth of secrets and even different endings to the game. The multiple overlapping time-space layers mean actions in the rear-end of time will affect locations in the future.

Those of you looking for E3 clarification of Noel, he’s got a back story similar to DBZ’s Trunks, or the Terminator series. Noel is from the future where he’s the last man alive and has traveled back in time stop the catastrophe that destroys the human race. XIII-2’s timeline is connected to the Fall of Cocoon, which happens at the tail end of the last game. The AF you see in the screenshots means After the Fall. If you liked the characters from the last incarnation, good news, they’ll be sure to make their appearances as you traverse through time-space of the this game.

Time travel and an area with unlocked portals to different periods—this all must sound familiar to you SNES RPG players. Could this be a rip of the 1995, Akira Toriyama drawn classic Chrono Trigger?

“We really have received a lot of feedback about the game, but among the voices there are those who say it reminds them of the classic RPG, CHRONO TRIGGER,” said game director Motomu Toriyama. “For FINAL FANTASY XIII-2, we are aiming to make time travel a major thematic direction, and be able to express this on high-end game machines.”